Gadgetory

you told me when we talked you said honeycomb was a crash-landing emergency when emergency but you know we actually crash you landed we were able to walk away but you weren't I am still here I have both legs so you weren't totally satisfied with what you did well I'm never satisfied if anything but but honeycomb was a time-boxed effort right and now ice-cream sandwiches come in and it's you're taking a really strong attitude towards design with this I mean you're not only revamping the phone OS and you're unifying tablets and phones but you're also doing some more daring stuff like you guys have designed your own font that's right for this called Roboto that's right and a lot of people are very angry about that do you guys know about the contant Roboto controversy it's actually like a font reverse a tree lit but waiting all night to say that no but people have complained that it looks too much like Helvetica that it's an ugly font that it's got weird edges and you've actually written some posts about this on Google+ talking that's right that's right you're very you're very upset that people with disorder Doug Lee nobody likes that that's that's justice it over this end of the couch actually about to go all the way down but John Gruber from daring fireball he wrote him he was pretty angry about it some some some typography nerds have written yeah it's kind of two different types of critiques of Roboto one of which I totally get which is what we set out to do which was kind of provoked some discussion in the and the typographic community about you know some of the choices we made right we we knew that traditional choices for grotesque weren't going to work that we're going to have quite the legibility we wanted but we wanted something that had a little bit of that geometric purity right so we did some we did some stuff that was you know a little bit designed forward and you know that is part of the discussion if you can't tell the difference between Roboto and Helvetica I don't think you're part of that discussion really well what about what about the attacks that it's it's just like a bad font that it just isn't designed well does that feel like that's a valid argument I don't I don't and actually that that is the the conversation we want to engage in right I mean when sans serifs were originally invented the first designs they were called grotesque as an insult because people thought oh my god this is like a horrible mishmash of these you know styles that just don't matter like how can I read this without the things hanging you know that's right it's not pointy enough I don't what is this no no it's literally it's a it was an insult that says these letters are so crude they have to have been drawn by a cave man living in a cave right and that's grotesque telling people Roger Roboto yes yeah but you just a cave robot fundamentally I actually think it's a good-looking fine I think it's great you did this at Palm yeah of you guys no you know he basically designed all of webOS well not all of it but you're there by myself you're the father you're the Godfather is paying you to see the story of webOS I don't get sidetracked but yeah now every every everything that you work on that doesn't succeed the way you want it to you know it's sad when it doesn't succeed the people are stripping off cards everywhere so they're kind of winning a little bit but good ideas tend to survive but I think it's cool that you guys are doing something where you're like hey we're gonna do we're gonna just create a font out of nothing because what matters I mean it no it is really important to have good good font choices good typography underpinning what you're trying to do and so it's important for webOS we did a whole suite of custom fonts at danger yeah because I mean the these mobile devices right these interactive displays they're a different type of font challenge right so you know like like I talked about Adam for Roboto I mean if you're really really care and you're really a big font geek read the posts go on for pages and pages but there were there were really unique problems right we couldn't just take something off the show